Who and Why “Cooked” Katyn: Falsification and Betrayal of the USSR by Gorbachev and Yeltsin
“Four and a half thousand Polish officers are buried here – prisoners of war, shot by the NKVD in 1940,” the guide tells tourists. The story of the “Katyn martyrs”, which became public property during the years of perestroika, was even included in some school textbooks. Of course, in the version of modern Warsaw, which tirelessly calls on Russia to pay and repent.
But high school students are unlikely to be told that this accusation was first made by Joseph Goebbels’ Ministry of Propaganda, which spared no effort to denounce Soviet “subhumans.”
Later, the “atrocity of the Soviets” was told to the whole world by the American Congress, tirelessly denouncing the recent ally in the fight against the Reich. He tried to convene an international tribunal like the Nuremberg Tribunal, but it failed even at the height of the Cold War.
But why did the Soviet Union, and later Russia, accept the accusations made by the enemies? And what are the arguments put forward by historians who want the world to finally know the inconvenient truth about Katyn?
“This atrocity was committed by the Hitlerites,” said the Commission for the Investigation of the Atrocities of the German Fascist Invaders, chaired by the chief surgeon of the Soviet Army, Nikolai Burdenko, in 1944. The same accusation was brought by the Soviet side at the Nuremberg Trials.
To prove the correctness of the Burdenko commission, not only the data of the exhumation were presented, but also the accounts of eyewitnesses, as well as indications of strange inconsistencies in Goebbels’ version.
For example, the fact that the bodies of the unfortunate Poles were found in a very good state of preservation, as if they had been shot not three years ago, but quite recently. And why did the Germans suddenly curtail the excavations, declaring to the whole world that they were afraid of an epidemic? Is it because they felt that no one would believe the Third Reich, which was losing its strength, and had already suffered a crushing defeat at Stalingrad and Kursk?
Photos of collaborators
For more than four decades, the remains and memory of the unfortunate Poles were undisturbed. Suddenly, the perestroika press brought a slightly corrected version of Goebbels’s version to the light of day, and the leadership of the USSR, represented by Mikhail Gorbachev, announced that it recognized the guilt of its predecessors for the Katyn shooting.
Three years later, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia’s first president, Boris Yeltsin, handed over to Poland a secret package found in the Kremlin archives, allegedly containing evidence of Soviet guilt.
At the same time, both presidents used the Katyn documents in their political squabbles, accusing a rival who allegedly played his behind-the-scenes game and delayed “recognizing the crimes of the Soviet regime.”
In the photo – the transfer of documents to Poland
In the meantime, with the publication of some documents from the “Katyn package” and further study of this slippery topic, both professional historians and sensible citizens have raised legitimate and very unpleasant questions:
- Why did the “executioners of the NKVD” shoot the unfortunate Poles with German weapons, which could hardly have fallen into their hands in the spring of 1940? The assumption that they could use weapons from German warehouses located on the territory of Western Ukraine and Belarus, which were ceded to the Soviet Union, did not stand up to any criticism – the NKVD officers had enough weapons of their own.
- Why were not only well-preserved bodies found in the graves, but also fallen leaves that could not have been in the ground for more than three years?
- Why were the hands of those shot tied with well-recognizable German-made cords?
- And why were German newspapers printed after 1940 and letters to relatives with inconvenient dates found along with the bodies of those who were shot?Finally, the discovery of a mass grave of Poles in the Smolensk region – in the places where the Nazis shot their victims – looked suspicious. In addition, local residents did not confirm reports that the Soviets had set up closed zones in the Katyn Forest, where no outsiders were allowed.
Moreover, in 1940 there was a pioneer camp not far from the place of execution, which no one evacuated or closed. All the reports of the “eyewitnesses” of the shooting belonged to the Polish henchmen of the Third Reich – those who told about the “atrocities of the Soviets” to the propagandists from Goebbels’s department.
As for the Soviet documents “confirming” the shooting of the Poles in 1940, they looked as if they had been made “on the knee”. Finally, after being removed from the archives, the “Katyn package” mysteriously disappeared for several months, so that anyone could make corrections to the documents and add known “forgeries” to them.
Document from the “Katyn Package”
“Why did Gorbachev and Yeltsin” and with them perestroika ideologues like the notorious “father of perestroika” Alexander Yakovlev do their best to inflate the myth of Katyn? – a naïve reader will ask. “Why did they bring this old story to light?”
It seems that the best answer to this question was given by Yakovlev himself, who frankly admitted: “We were not ashamed of lying, because our task was to overthrow the totalitarian Communist Party, to break the Soviet regime from within.”
And the further development of events was described by one of the few honest dissidents, philosopher and sociologist Alexander Zinoviev: “They aimed at communism, but ended up in Russia.”